The psychology of a woman is intriguing in its very naïveté, and now as she stood before me, slim and graceful in her well-cut walking costume, a quick flicker of red flaming in her cheeks and her eyes alight with that sweet tantalizing look in which expectation and a hot pride were mingled, I wondered and felt sick at heart. Desirable she was beyond any other woman I had known, and I called myself witling coward, to have avoided putting my fortune to the test on that fatal day of my departure for Mesopotamia. For just as she looked at me now she had looked at me then. But to-day she was evidently on the point of setting out—I did not doubt with the purpose of meeting Eric Coverly; on that day of the irrevocable past she had been free and I had been silent.
"You nearly missed me, Jack," she said gayly. "I was just going out."
By the very good-fellowship of her greeting she restored me to myself and enabled me to stamp down—at least temporarily—the monster through whose greedy eyes I had found myself considering the happiness of Eric Coverly.
"I am afraid, Isobel," I replied, "that what I have to tell you is not by any means pleasant—although—"
"Yes?" she prompted, noting how I hesitated.
"Although it means that you are now the future Lady Coverly."
The bright color left her cheeks. That some black tragedy underlay my words she had intuitively perceived, but I could see that she failed to grasp the whole meaning of my bald statement. She sank down slowly into a cushioned chair, so that a beam of golden light pouring in through the opened window set aglowing the russet tints in her dark brown hair.
"Did you know Sir Marcus?" I asked, speaking as gently as I could.
With what intense, if hidden, emotion I awaited her answer it were impossible to describe.
"Do you mean—"